I think what I often need as a teacher and as a GM is to fully internalize the content, and do some boring legwork to ensure things to smoothly logistically, and then at the moment I'm not doing anything "creative," I'm just responding as the activity demands. Keith Johnstone talks in *Impro* about unlocking creativity in people by helping them go through rituals which make them feel like they're not responsible for their creative output, and I think this does fall under that.
The internalization of the content is the fun side of prep. I have to make time for it because otherwise toddlers and logistics will take over my life, but I don't fundamentally find that creating my own material and adapting someone else's are super different on this score. If I'm adapting someone else's I have to adapt it to understand/internalize it, and if I'm rolling my own I typically have to make some high level creative decisions and then any lower level ones are typically in not-consciously-creative, what-would-be-the-logical-consequence or what-is-immediately-apparent modes. I'll be making a lot of flashcards. This is most apparent in the classroom, where everything is in service of getting students in meaningful contact with content that I didn't myself create - any "content" that I created or stole from the dept's GDrive or whatever is a mediating mechanism rather than the thing itself.
I don't run much because actually getting people together is in the boring logistics ledger so I find I almost never have the energy. I'll think through a lot of campaigns because that's in the internalization ledger. So reading Wolves was great and I would look forward to reading it again more deliberately as a form of campaign prep, and I'd feel guilty that I'd probably be procrastingating just getting some people together to play it.
The internalization of the content is the fun side of prep. I have to make time for it because otherwise toddlers and logistics will take over my life, but I don't fundamentally find that creating my own material and adapting someone else's are super different on this score. If I'm adapting someone else's I have to adapt it to understand/internalize it, and if I'm rolling my own I typically have to make some high level creative decisions and then any lower level ones are typically in not-consciously-creative, what-would-be-the-logical-consequence or what-is-immediately-apparent modes. I'll be making a lot of flashcards. This is most apparent in the classroom, where everything is in service of getting students in meaningful contact with content that I didn't myself create - any "content" that I created or stole from the dept's GDrive or whatever is a mediating mechanism rather than the thing itself.
I don't run much because actually getting people together is in the boring logistics ledger so I find I almost never have the energy. I'll think through a lot of campaigns because that's in the internalization ledger. So reading Wolves was great and I would look forward to reading it again more deliberately as a form of campaign prep, and I'd feel guilty that I'd probably be procrastingating just getting some people together to play it.