Game Prep: The Mental State

Preparing an adventure represents about 80% of my game prep process. This includes stating the Bad Guys, setting the difficulty of the various Non-Combat challenges and creating loot that the players will appreciate.

Aside: One of my last D&D 3.5 purchases was the Magic Item Compedium. This book is phenomenal and a preview of what 4e will be about. A very small part of it are Treasure Generation charts that are 10X easier to deal with than the one in the DMG. And any magical loot generated by them are now always on par with current character levels. It is part of my D&D 3.X top 5 list, along with the 3.0 Dungeon Master Guide, The DMG II, The Tome of Battle:Book of Nine Swords, Dungeonscape and the Fiendish Codex 1.

That being said, I often use published adventures, but when I do, I tweak the plotlines to fit the campaign. I also significantly alter encounters to make them more fun to the players (I get rid of unfun monsters and lame traps, I modify the loot for stuff the players will find more useful, etc). It still takes a lot of my free time (but DMing is my main hobby so I don’t mind).

The other 20% is not related to the actual game, but my mental state. You see, I really dig DMing. Preparing a game is one of the few activities that brings me to the Flow state of mind (creating clever simple quality processes, or resolving a lab incident are also Flow inducing, but this ain’t a Job Blog).

I don’t know if any of you have reached this state but it can get scary. The High Energy thing the Wikipedia mentions is spot on. So much so that I can’t for the life of me have a good night sleep after a good prep session because I feel so energized. This week’s session killed me and I spent a lot of Thursday as a Zombie at work.

So to recuperate, I always try to finish Prepping 2 days before the game. It gives me a good night sleep on Thursday night. I also allows me one evening to watch some Battlestar with my wife (which I worship , she takes over parenting duty for my 2 kids during my game nights). I take one hour (no more) on Thursday evenings to clean up my gaming room (the place is buried in Rulebooks, Notes, Post Its, Maps and Minis), putting minis into little encounter boxes (put map on table, Dump box on map, combat starts! How neat is that?) and wiping the latest artistic masterpieces my 4-year-old daughter left on my Vinyl Battlemaps (You should see the Butterfly men and the Mean Big-headed Ogre she drew… She’ll make a good DM I swear, she’s bossy enough for that).

Then, before the game, I visualize each encounter, think up clever quotes and phrases for the NPCs. On Friday evening, I open a bottle of beer to socialize with my work-tired players as they arrive, order food and shoot the breeze until we feel we are ready to start the game.

Its a good life I tell you.