Prep Time Vs. Play Time

the Jester · May 21, 2004

The 'winging it' thread got me to wondering- dms, how does the amount of time you spend prepping compare to the amount of time you spend actually playing?

Fenes · May 21, 2004

I think I average about 1 hour of preparing per 4 to 5 hours of gaming. Actual preparing time varies between 30 minutes and 2 hours.

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WizarDru · May 21, 2004

In some cases, I may or may not spend a good chunk of prep time developing the campaign, but in general I spend far less time preparing for the game than running it...and most of that is owed to stat-blocks and rules research (or, on when adapting modules, on reading the module itself).

EricNoah · May 21, 2004

I think it may be somewhere around a 2-to-1 ratio: 8 hours of prep (spread out over a couple of weeks) to get ready for a 4-hour game. A lot of my "prep" though is just thinking -- mulling things over, etc. Another big chunk of my prep is getting stats ready (coming up with a nice menu of monster stats, developing NPC stats, etc.). The rest is kind of putting it together, developing timelines (what happened when, especially important for any kind of mystery or investigative adventure), finding or making a map, etc.

Piratecat · May 21, 2004

I generally spend less time on preparing the night's game than actually playing it, and I definitely spend less time developing the campaign in general than playing. Even my NPC development for big combats has become abbreviated. Ironically enough, the only big time sink at this point is the story hour; I'm just not a fast writer.

Part of this is having an older campaign with well-established plot threads. A lot of plot writes itself.

derelictjay · May 21, 2004

Most of the time I spend less time on the preparing the night, than the actual game night (my player's would probably kill me if they found out). Though I spend an inordinate amount of time on preparing the campaign in general, why because I'm always looking to improve the setting, giving it more flavor.

Kalendraf · May 21, 2004

For me, the amount of prep time varies heavily depending on whether I'm running something homebrew vs. something published. I try to alternate between those two options in my campaigns, mostly because I just don't have enough time to create every adventure by hand, yet I want to run some of my own material when I can. For the published adventures, I suspect I only need to prep for about 1 hour for 4 hours of play. But when I make my own adventures, those numbers are sometimes reversed, though more likely 2 hours of prep per 1 hour of play.

BlackMoria · May 21, 2004

10 minutes prep time per 5 hour game session. I firmly in the ranks of the 'Wing it' crowd.

Nifft · May 21, 2004

At the beginning of a story arc: lots of prep time.

In the middle of a story arc: very little prep time.

Right now, at the beginning of SIX interwoven story arcs: quite a lot of prep time, and even then, I'm often forced to wing things as the PCs don't do what I expect.

-- N

Wombat · May 21, 2004

I spend a lot of time working up the campaign world I am going to use. I really enjoy this process. I work on timelines, laws, holidays, manner of dress, foods, monsters, interesting treasures, NPCs (both opponents and just people-in-the-street) and all the rest. If the world is detailed enough, the adventures flow from this.

Thus my prep time for specific adventures is usually much lower as the world is already in place. In fact, if I do enough background prep work, the players discover extra plots in the campaign!

Now that spells gaming goodness to these tired eyes