4e increased my DM prep time...

...and I wonder why.

I hear that 4e dropped the prep time for a lot of DMs, and I don't doubt it, but I do wonder if there's something in my style that provokes this.

See, back in 3e, I was a heavily "wing it" kind of DM. 3e made that pretty easy. Pick a few monsters whose CR's were within about 3 of the PC's levels, slap a plot to chain them together, dangle a hook or two in front of the party, and I was solid to go. Any odd questions or strange rules, I could either say, "Look it up in Book X," or confidently ad hoc it if we couldn't find the rule quickly. I felt kind of liberated by the amount of options, because I could implicitly trust the books to deliver me to where I was going, and I could use some of the more idiosyncratic rules to my advantage. They would generate interesting narrative all by themselves ("Why does this angel have spell-like ability X?" became a hook for the plot and the encounter with the creature).

I wasn't overly concerned with balance or exact details. I knew 3e had some issues here and there with things that could be unbalanced, but, because I didn't have to prep that much, I could spend my time during a session fudging and twisting as appropriate, if the players weren't having fun. Those imbalances, though, often caused some of the fun. Monsters with obscene grapple checks, forex, rather than being a problem, became memorable. The quirks enabled fun.

Now, in 4e, I'm finding my prep time is dramatically increased from "virtually nothing" to "a good evening or two."

Part of it is quantity. In 3e, one or two monsters would challenge a whole party. In 4e, I need to mix and match at least 4-5 different monsters, each of which has their own abilities and powers to use. I also need to present a battlegrid that is "interesting," in that it needs to contain terrain features, traps, hazards, or other rules bits to interact with (when I did that in 3e it was icing on the cake, but 4e kind of requires it).

Part of it seems to be the "leveling off" of abilities. There's nothing inherently dramatic or exceptional about any monster or PC ability -- they're balanced very well, which means they kind of homogenize. It's the "it doesn't matter how you describe it, the effects are what is key" problem. That same issue plagues skill challenges. There's no fiddly abilities that make you sit up and pay attention, nothing I can hang a hook on and go "why?", nothing that stands out to catch interest. 4e is a sleeker beast.

Part of it is the fact that I can't trust the books to have rules for what I need. Because everything is designed for one narrow purpose, if the party, say, decides to recruit the centaur instead of kill it, I can't just run the monster sheet, I need to use the DMG2 and re-format the thing. The way I run games ("do whatever you want, I'll tell you the consequences") means that narrowly effective individual rules are actually more of a hassle than broadly implemented general principles. I can't just go from what makes sense and see where that takes me. I have to take into account the consequences of my rulings. Which makes me less adventurous, less willing to branch out.

I'm starting this out with the usual disclaimers. I play, and enjoy, 4e. I'd like to keep doing so. Don't tell me my experience is wrong (it's not, it is my actual experience). Try to keep Edition Wars out of it, don't assume you know the motives of another poster, make sure any criticisms are pointed and no general, accept what people have to say, etc., etc.

But, do you have advice for me? Or similar experiences? I'd like to get back to the smooth way I had of running 3e adventures, where it was easy to link A to B to C and to let the game sort of flow from its own quirks, but I'd still like to keep 4e, since it has other advancements that I do really like. I already own DDI, which helps immensely (I don't think I'd play or DM 4e without it, personally), but the flow has been interrupted. It fees a little like 4e is so smooth, there is no friction, and I just slide around trying to stick my brain on it.

Kamikaze Midget said:

...But, do you have advice for me?

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Go back to 3e.

Kamikaze Midget said:

...Or similar experiences?

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Yeah, my prep time decreased about 90% switching from d20 to Savage Worlds.

The moral of the story is: use what is easy & fun for you.

One of the things that made 3e easy to wing at least for me was I'd played and ran it for 8 years. 4e is still pretty new and I'm not as comfortable winging it as I was 3e, but I imagine once I've ran 4e for as long as I did 3e that it will be similiar. 3e was not easy to wing back in 2001 either.

Is your party heavily min-maxed and invested in group tactics? Or are they a bit more casual, playing what's fun without having to be optimal?

If the former, I can definitely see an increase in prep time with 4E, because to optimally use a bunch of complementary creatures takes a lot of work to understand their tactics and figure out how they work together (plus for a given session you have to figure that out 3-4 times, compared to the PCs needing to figure it out once).

If they are a more casual group, though, you may be setting the bar too high for yourself. If the PCs aren't maxed out, you can wing it a bit more easily. Pick monsters by general role -- a couple of soldiers, an artillery, and a lurker or two, topped off with a few minions -- and don't worry about exact powers or how they mesh. Once you know how the monster role works, you have the basic tactics and battlefield positioning down, and you really don't need to be an expert in the individual powers.

Don't forget too that you can reduce prep by using modular encounters, reducing combat encounters for more RP encounters or "skill challenges" (I use quotes because I don't mean skill challenges in the 4E rulebook sense, which I haven't found to work worth beans -- I mean scenarios where the players solve a problem via a combination of RP and skill checks, whether traps, puzzles, negotiations, research, etc), and by using a session template (example: 3 combat encounters, one with a mixed group, one mook-heavy, one solo; one RP-focused negotiation; and one skill-focused problem).

Oh, and I find it smoother to not sweat exact execution of minute rules. DM's intuition goes a long way if you have experience, and you can always put the onus on knowing specific stuff back on the rules lawyer in the group (ever gaming group has one).

A little planning on how you string your basic framework together will make the prep of the individual encounters much easier once you get the rhythm down, and taking the casual approach should cut the prep further and enable you to return to "wing it" mode.

if you have super-min-maxed PCs, though ... I guess you can just be glad you aren't playing high-level 3E!

Is it possible that 4E has simply caused you to care about your encounters more? From reading your post, it doesn't seem like you have more busy work so much as more actual, good thought behind the encounters.

I have the opposite problem: 4e drastically reduced my prep time, but increased encounter time too much.

Despite the simplification from 3e to 4e, many monster stat blocks are needlessly cluttered. This is most obvious with elite and solo blocks, but normal monsters suffer from it too. Exhibit A: the goblin warrior. Great Position doesn't help the goblin fulfill its skirmisher role, it penalized the goblin for not running around like a headless chicken while giving the DM one more detail to think about. Sometimes I simply ignore a monster power or two, and jack its damage instead.

Many of my encounters are simple; no particular terrain features and monster parties made up of only 1 - 2 types. 'Wolf pack' type encounters are great like this, because I only have to keep track of one stat block.

I am definitely putting more time into preparation. It is true that I am spending more time doing creative things, but I have found out that I have to work harder to be creative.

I don't do "on-the-fly" encounters, but based on experience with older-edition-to-4e conversions, I'd say it doesn't suck terribly to just think of the kind of encounter you want to set up in 3e terms, then just search Monster Builder for the same creatures and see if they're close enough to represent your ideas (tweak levels etc. if necessary).

Also, since 4e creatures are essentially strawmen anyway, it isn't that hard to just use the standardized stats from the DMG for whatever level MOBs you want to throw at the party, then decide on a simple mix of melee/single-target-ranged/AOE with possibly one appropriate/themed status effect per attack. Generally the attacks aren't going to threaten the party regardless of how you plan it out, so the important parts are really the HP and defenses (which are set where they are in order to keep the encounters at a certain length). My own recommendations are to do the usual lower-HP-higher-damage adjustment, and also to avoid at-will daze in any form.

My prep time's about where it was when I'd been running 3e for about the same amount of time. It drops really quickly if I get to use monsters I've already put on index cards and don't have to jot down (I prefer reusable cards to printing out what I need via DDI).

I do spend more time thinking about interesting encounter terrain, locales, dynamics, things like that... but I sort of guiltily feel I should have been doing that all along.

I learned to DM with 3.5, so maybe my experience is atypical, but. . .I didn't really see much change, really.

See, I am not usually OCD, but when it comes to being prepared for somthing like DMing, where I am kind of the center of attention, I am pretty serious about making sure everything works right.

For 3.5 that meant drawing a map on one side of graph paper, and copying simplified statblocks onto the other side. For 4e, it is looking through the full list of available creeps and printing out their stats, and selecting a good randomized dungeon and altering it to fit.

Both take about the same amount of time, but the focus is kind of in different places. If 3.5 had similar digital tools, or I had been at that stage of using more prepared material, then yeah. . .I could see 4e taking longer, but that's not a terrible thing. The difference in time is not large enough to ruin my life.

All that being said, I still consider myself somewhat of a freshman DM, so that may be another thing that makes my experience unique.

Jay