Over my career as a DM, dating back to 1980, I’ve noticed a difference between how much I prep in my campaigns versus how much the party actually explores. Give or take, the players at my table usually only discover about 30% of the world I create and the things within it.

So why prep the other 70%? It’s because you can’t tell which people, places and things they’ll discover and which ones they won’t.

In this article, I’ll cover how to prep in a flexible way, I’ll give you a specific example showing how, and I’ve added some hard-earned advice at the end that can save you tons of time.

The Hard Truth About Prep

If you think I’m going to say, “Stop prepping the other 70%”, that would be the easy but incorrect approach.

Here’s the hard truth: Go ahead and prep all of it, but do it in a way that stays flexible no matter what the party explores or ignores.

However, if you’re running a true sandbox campaign, where there is no connecting plot tying everything together, or there’s no plot at all, much of the advice I share in this video won’t apply to your style of running the game. If that’s you, go watch some cat videos or better yet see what Ginny Di is up to. She makes great content.

D&D Players Are as Predictable Cats on Crack

When I wrote that only about 30% of my adventure prep ever gets consumed by the players, how did that make you feel? Was that intimidating or dispiriting? Could you imagine buying and wrapping ten gifts for someone’s birthday, and they only open three of them and completely ignore the other seven?

The advice in this article would be pointless if you knew ahead of time which 30% of your adventure would get attention and which 70% would be ignored. That never happens, though. Come on, these are D&D players. They’re as predictable as cats on crack.

This means you still have to wrap all those adventuring presents without any requirement they be opened in any particular order. And, the campaign can survive even if the majority never get unwrapped at all.

Prep, Don’t Plan

Go ahead and prep it all. That’s the reality. Even if it’s to the most minimalist level of detail, such as a single line in your notes, prep it all. At least it will pass through your brain that there’s a hobgoblin hiding behind that tree; it’s there. It exists.

The not-so-secret secret is, prepare it but don’t PLAN it.

Don’t require that hobgoblin hiding behind the tree to be encountered or fought or parlayed with or anything in order for the campaign to go forward.

If you think about it, a lot of the stuff DMs put into their adventure designs isn’t required for the core of the campaign to move forward anyway. Much of it is set dressing, sometimes to give the adventure flavor, and other times to give the party something to do or a challenge they face to make it interesting. But if you pulled it out, the main plot would still continue.

Clear Quest Directions

Here’s two important points. Don’t make the players guess what their high-level objective is, but at the same time, don’t lore dump on them, or give them a laundry list of what they have to accomplish, with the location and order all spelled out.

Whether they need to slay the dragon, or steal the royal scepter, or rescue the ogre from the princess … whatever it is, the party should have a pretty clear idea what their goal is.

How they go about doing it is where the adventuring fun comes into play. You can give hints without them being obvious. You can adjust at the table in numerous ways to reveal pieces of the plot without it being a lore dump. Talking magpies, scraps of parchment, murmuring hermits, you get the point.

Be sure to check out, “See also “Stop Lore Dumping in D&D: Let Players Discover Your World” at https://ruckerworks.com/2025/12/stop-lore-dumping-dnd/

Skip the Plan

If you have it in your plan that a wandering minstrel on the Queen’s Road gives them a hint in their song, but the party never travels on that road and therefore never meets the minstrel (perhaps they instead follow a path through the mountains) adapt and let the party find song lyrics scrawled upon a scrap of parchment tucked in the pack of a trapper they find dead along the trail, killed by a mountain lion so recently their mauled body is still warm.

What I did there was convey information based on prep instead of a plan. The prep was the information found in the song lyrics. Planning was requiring it to be conveyed in a particular place and manner. That’s the difference. Prep is what, plan is where, when, and how.

Include the what, then let the rest happen organically.

Recycle Your Unused Prep

At the top of this article, I promised some hard-earned advice that can save you time. I’m a DM of my word, so here it is.

Keep track of what’s been discovered and what hasn’t. Take that 70% of stuff that the party never finds or explores and reuse it later in the same adventure, or in other adventures entirely.

This is especially valuable as a time-saver when it comes to maps and all they contain. There’s no reason why that unexplored dungeon beneath the ruined monastery you created for Campaign X can’t be available for use in Campaign Y.

Or, if you have that dungeon located under a monastery in hex A4, but the party never goes to that sector, just relocate it to be in hex C5. As long as the underlying reason for that dungeon to be there, or the reason why it’s filled with zombies, can be adapted on the fly for the new location, you’re golden.

Re-use

Prep is a terrible thing to waste.

You’ve now utilized a bunch of prep that you spent valuable time creating, and kept it from being wasted. The players should have no reason to suspect that what you designed has been repurposed or relocated.

I do this all the time when running different groups of players. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to get at least two runs of every adventure I design by using them with different groups of players.