Quote Originally Posted by Skrum View Post
The benefit of doing a massive, comprehensive amount of "prep." While I absolutely agree that this kind of world interaction is excellent and something DM's should strive for, in practice it's often hard to do. Planning a whole encounter might take significant prep. Letting the players bypass it with a check or two, that can be hard to swallow. And it also implies the DM should be sitting on 10 times more content than what's going to come up at any given time.
Alternately, it implies that part of the DM's job is to learn to prep content generators - things that make it easy to determine things on the fly - rather than content whenever possible. That could be everything from prepping things in a modular manner so that you can reuse elements of your prep, to just mapping out motivations and goals and general themes and then filling in the blanks only when they're needed, to doing everything full on improvisation all the time.