Abandoning Prep

A sequel to Join me in just prepping what's fun I have a Stonetop game coming up in a couple hours. I feel like I should prep, but I don't want to. Why? Is it because what I say won't be interesting enough? Stonetop itself says one of the reasons to prep is to "shore up your weaknesses" (Book 1, p. 204); this implies your GMing has weaknesses! In addition, you can't (definitionally) know what prep is needed in advance. That's impossible, assuming you allow your players to make decisions and have agency. I certainly have prepped things I was certain would arise next session and been completely wrong about that. I feel this malaise most keenly when I get frustrated at tracking factional moves, as in my recent open table game of Blades '68. I don't often incorporate those faction moves into sessions, because I don't know what the players will do. They are divorced from the present-moment activity of running the game. Would anything bad happen if I just dropped those systems? Would the…