That title brings back memories of my Internship in a Molecular Biology lab, before DNA isolation became automated.
Anyway, yesterday’s post took more creative juice than originally planned. Today I’ll keep it shorter and turn the keyboard over to you earlier on (Andy, your new year’s recommendations are simmering in my noggin’ and will be heeded).
One of the things that blogging made me realize was that I sometimes spent too much energy prepping for a game, especially when I create a whole adventure from Scratch.
Those who follow my Adventure-Prep series might have noticed that I’ve tried to cut back on prepping by using more and more of pre-made stuff I already owned. What follows is a summary of the techniques I used and write about in that series:
- Using the pre-made classed critters (alliteration!) found in the Monster Manuals (especially the later ones)
- Using new monsters found in periodicals like Dragon, Dungeon and Pathfinder
- Using published adventures, throwing as little or as much away as I feel like.
- Use D&D mini stat card, tiles and battlemaps to create unique visually engaging encounters
But I still invest significant (but very well spent) amounts of time trying to awesome up a gaming session by:
- Shaping scenes or encounters to meet all player’s motivations at least once.
- Creating ties between adventure elements and setting (organizations, NPCs, etx) to fluff up the adventure.
- Making generous use of coincidences to glue it all up and hook the players
- Make treasures they find and info they uncover (journals, letters, rumours) point toward yet undecided plots and stories
That last one is a recent development to help me prevent the dreaded ‘painted into a corner’ syndrome when I use linear plot too much. Now I can use the player’s (not always) subtle comments on this or that plot device to fuel my creativity for later games.
That still amounts me to between 2 to 4 hours of prep time (i.e. close to 1:1 vs played time) per game session… (Although sometime I prepare more than I need and I only need about 1 hour to adjust it to later sessions)
But I feel that some people read what I do and scoff. Yax boasts that he spends less than 30 minutes on his prep
Trash Talking aside: Guess which one Yax is in the image above! You’re so going down bro!
Also, other DMs, who seem to be a lot more freeform than I, told me they don’t spend nearly as much time on this.
So I ask you all , DM readers and bloggers: What are your tricks that allow you to pull off a successful game with minimal prep time?
What was your last prepping session like? I’m really curious.
There’s no magic involved: When I have no time to prep, I just wing it. But winging it requires having made some investment long before the critical moment: You need to know the next two or three adventures you have in mind. You need to know what the plot and the two or three current subplots are. You need to have looked at monsters and NPCs and picked some that you liked.
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…
It depends what you consider preparation time… I can spent weeks or even months preparing my campaign but close to nothing before the start of the game just to be up and running to where we last stop.
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…
I generally try to do my prep by building “islands” of things that I can use at later points in time. I might plan an encounter with a group of orcs, and I make sure to have their stats. As far as where and when that encounter is going to happen, I’m not exactly sure until we start playing. I know where I *think* it will be, but I’m not sure what the players will do yet. I get the flow of the game in my mind, and then see what the players do as I start the game out. If things are changing on me, then I change the flow of the game in my mind.
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.
My last prep session was quite literally during a 30 minute chess game with my sharpest player that arrived early for the game last night.
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.
Alex: It seems we have similar approaches to deep preparation. I’m just not much of a comfortable improviser.
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!
I must be one of the outliers in this sampling, because I not only take 5-6 hours of prep for each session, but I am quite comfortable with that amount of time I use.
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.
My prep time varies a lot. Ideally, I aim for 30 minutes prep for a 3 hour game though.
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.
Well DNA, I for one, don’t think that less preparation time equals better DM. I’ve always considered ChattyDM a better DM then I and mostly because of his narrative skill.
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
I think that is a fair assessment. I think that if you look across the blogosphere, you will see a number of people boasting on their short prep times, when really boasting should be more on delivery/presentation.
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.
I agree entirely. Different GMs work differently, and how quickly you prep definitely isn’t a measure of your skills at the table. I’ve known great GMs who spend //hours// preparing for a game, and equally great ones who do no prep at all – or claim they do, at least 🙂
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 🙂
Excellent points on delivery (and not just because Yan is sucking up! j/k) and definitively material for a future post…
I’m thinking “Zen and the art of Game delivery… (30 minutes or it’s free!)”
😀
Have you seen Encounter a Day? It’s a blog full of encounter ideas, seeds, and hooks. They are all varied, and I get inspired to work on my campaign just reading them. Another way to reduce prep time, or at least fish for inspiration:
http://www.encounteraday.com/
Thanks for the reference… Asmor is one of our beloved (albeit treacherous) Minions here 🙂
I need very little prep as a rule. I have the outlines of the campaign well in mind far into the future, and I generally have more detailed outlines for the next few sessions in mind based on what the players know and have been doing at the moment. I usually keep two or three hot plotlines more or less ready in the back of my head in case the players head in an unexpected direction (“let’s find the missing explorer and let someone else spy on the Evil Empire”). For an individual session, I just write a page or two of brief notes, just a sentence or so, for each of the events that need to happen or that might happen depending on chance or player choices, and that can be worked in if convenient for color, background, or humor. I also make a quick list of names of characters, ships, places etc. that may be needed, since I get absentminded about such things and pawing through old session info breaks the game flow. I improvise dialog, descriptions, and some encounters on the fly (and keep notes on a laptop for future reference). I find that doing less prep leads to a rambling boring session and future plot holes and retconning. Doing more detailed planning on the other hand, is either wasted when time or player choice gets the material cut or leads to a klunky session with poor flow. In particular, writing dialog in advance is a complete waste of time. The players NEVER take a conversation in the direction i would expect, and trying to use it anyway leads rapidly to DM of the Rings territory. Total prep time for a single session, not counting the background I have built up over the years this campaign has been going, is about ten minutes to an hour, two hours at the very most for an extremely important, climactic, or complex situation.
Treacherous? P’shaw! I’m a perfect little angel.
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.