What do you mean, “What’s that you’re hiding behind your back?” Can’t a guy stand with his hands behind his back? Sheesh.

http://www.encounteraday.com/

I’m thinking “Zen and the art of Game delivery… (30 minutes or it’s free!)”

I find how much prep time I need depends as much on the system we’re using as anything. M&M and Savage Worlds both take less prep time than D&D, on average.

Either way, the amount of prep you do will always fill the time available

I think if you hone your delivery at the table, then you will discover how much prep you need to reach that level, and then you adjust your prep accordingly.

I know for me, if I run without detailed notes, that I can pull it off, but the delivery will be very superficial, where if I do my normal prep, then I know that have have the depth of notes, and of thought about them, to give me what I need to reach that level of delivery that I like to deliver.

You bring up a good point.

You see, preparation is one thing, delivery is everything the player see… You might prepare or not at all if you don’t know how to tell a story in an interesting way it won’t have the impact you wanted.

The preparation is in fact more related to the type of DM you are then your actual skill.

My 2 cents

Oftimes I wing it and run a zero-prep game. If it’s a Mutants & Masterminds session, that’s easy; we’ve a complete catalogue of villains, places and minions to fall back on without much difficulty.

For D&D, books such as the Mother of All Encounter Tables, Mother of all Treasure Tables, Lazy GM guides and later Monster Manuals certainly simplify things, a lot.

Like John, I also like to prepare “Encounter Islands” (love that name!) in advance too. It’s a great way of fleshing out the setting in your own mind as well as having something ready just in case the PCs head in that direction. For example, I know that in Southside of Freedom City lurks an intelligent man-shaped virus colony, hiding out of fear. When the PCs find him, their actions will unwittingly unleash a plague on the city. Prep done, Island written.

When it comes to actually thinking about the upcoming session, I’ll review the notes from the previous game (if it’s a continuance) and jot down, post-it style 5 or 6 events for this session. If they need stats, I’ll either use existing ones or create stats myself. Each session, we’ll perhaps only hit 2-4 of the events I’ve jotted out so I’ll carry the other ones forward, building an event resource as I go. I reckon my notebooks (spiral bound, reporter style) are full of about 200 unused events I could drop into a session at a moment’s notice – all of which cuts down on prep time.

Which is good.

The details of how I do my prep are written out here: http://www.dnaphil.com/2007/10/25/session-writing-its-all-in-the-notes/

But in a nutshell, I do about an hour of prep a night, for the week before my session.

I don’t mind taking my time working on scenes, because like to write each of my scenes with a healthy amount of detail and like to plan my encounters carefully. Running Iron Heroes, I really work hard to make my combat scenes very action packed, with zones, complex opponents, etc. So that my players can take full advantage of the IH combat system.

That is not to say I don’t use time saving techniques like recycling stat blocks, or dressing up monsters from the Monster Manual. I do those things as well, but it takes me about 5-6 hours to flesh out a full session.

Somewhere people started equating good GMing with short prep time. I don’t think that is necessarily true. Personally, I like to take my time with each scene to fine tune them, rather than have a rough idea of what is going to happen and wing it. In my own experiences, I have found that spending more time on my scenes has given them greater impact with my players than when I wing it, because I make sure that each scene has a specific purpose in the fabric of the campaign. I don’t have scenes that kill time, or are fluff encounters, everything that is run has a specific purpose.

I do ‘write’ whole scenes in my mind and it has worked out pretty well so far (the whole banquet scene of my last game was unwritten)… but I still build them before playing them out..

Yan: Oh I know your style old fella. I know it quite well… that’s why I look forward to co-DM with you this summer.

John: I like the Encounter Island idea John, I like it a lot. Stolen!

Zozeer: I see you’ve started using TV tropes as a springboard for campaigns and Blog material! Good for you. The Chessmaster is an ambitious villain model to tackle in a campaign. Good luck!

This might be because my campaign is reaching its end and I only have to coast through the last events.

My next campaign that takes place a few hundred years after this one, has me plotting within faints within sub plots within yet more faints. I’m going to run a good chessmaster at my party to see if the afore mentioned player can pick apart all the mess.

I think I will spend a lot more time at the old planning booth with those Xanatos Gambits.

If the group doesn’t go where I had thought the orcs would originally be encountered, I try to find a logical place where they might encounter them instead. I never try to force anything in, and I always try to have lots of stat blocks that I can pull out of my . . . hat, in case I need them. If I didn’t get the orcs in, but still need a combat, I’ll use the Orcs, but I’ll make them something more appropriate to the situation at hand. Maybe the same stats will work for bloodthirsty barbarians (with some tweaks). Most of all I always try to keep things flowing along in some direction, and making sense with what is going on in the game. I won’t change the plot or motivations of the NPCs and background players, but If something doesn’t get brought up with them in the game where I thought it was, I’ll try to figure out what would have happened to put them logically where they will eventually be encountered.

Then again I know my world, its organization’s and their motive by hearth I might need a little reminder (that’s when i take a few minutes of preparation) the rest is all improvisation and building on the action of the player…

Now you’re prepared to wing it.

Instead of mapping a labyrinth, just tell them about crawling and darkness and weird scraping sounds. Instead of preparing a battlemap just draw a big hall and galleries however you feel like. Instead of thinking of half a dozen rooms, just list the five interesting things to be found in a library…

Thus, I count everything as prep time: Reading about stuff on EN World to teach myself more about D&D, leafing through setting material like the City of Brass and the books from Planes of Law, skimming old Dungeon issues, reading adventures, skimming Monster Manuals…

The best impro talents don’t help if I don’t know that MM4 has a Lunar Reaver on CR7 that I can use to make a neat encounter wherever there’s swamp or forest or night or shadow.

The best impro talents don’t help in a fight against a wizard type if I don’t have NPC stats or monster stats ready (and in this case I knew the Madrir in Denizens of Avadnu is cool).

That takes at least 1:1 time for me.

I don’t spend more than half an hour preparing the fights of the evening. But then I’ll surely forget about iterative attacks, or casting Bull Strength, or any of the other gazillion traps the byzantine ruleset has in store for poor casual DMs like me…