DMs: How Much of Your Prep Work Never Gets Used??

[Michael Silverbane]

I use roughly about a quarter to a third of what I prepare for any given game. Which is... not much of it, to say the least. But I like to keep my campaigns really very open-ended and let the players' characters drive the story, going where ever their whims take them. I have stacks and stacks of sites and characters that the PCs have seen once or twice... if at all. Entire plot-lines, with kingdoms rising and falling have gone by with the PCs hearing nothing but rumors of their comings and goings in a distant, unvisited land.

I'm not really discouraged by it, though... because I have a good time writing the stuff up and imagining the various scenarios and transactions that could take place, whether the characters witness (or interfere with) them or not. And my players have a good time taking part in adventures that are as much of their own making as mine.

That said, if there's some event or scenario that I really want to happen, it'll happen (usually with some modification) wherever my players are at the time. Or if there's a site that I really want them to visit, then some problem comes up wherein the solution to that problem can be found in that site.

Later
silver

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I use at least 80% of my prep work.

 

[MonsterMash]

About 30-40%, but a lot is creating NPC's which may be reusable in other situations so the total over time will drop, when I first started GMing again it was probably higher as I had some time when I was out of work and lots of time and I didn't know how much prep was needed for 3.5.

 

[The Shaman]

Never is an awfully strong word - I've recycled campaign material several times, so I don't know how much of it ever really goes to waste.

That said, I frequently write out easily two to three times as much material as the players ever encounter, mostly NPC background so that I can roleplay "my characters" as well as the players roleplay theirs. Recently I spent about forty-five minutes on an NPC - he ended up with a total of two "on-camera" lines in our game, and while he many appear elsewhere, it's unlikely.

The same thing happens with locations. I try to give my adventure sites a good deal of texture, so there will be lists of books on shelves, a description of pictures on the walls, and so on. Part of this is to encourage the players to interact with the environment as much as possible, particularly for investigative adventures.

This is one of the aspects of GMing that I enjoy, so it's a labor of fun for me, even if the players never know what they're missing.

 

[DonTadow]

A better question is - is the time value of prep-work worth the payoff? One of my biggest complaints about d20 is that I might spend 30 minutes statting out some NPC or templated beast, only to have it slain in about a minute and a half.

There's just not any cost-benefit. This is especially true at higher levels.

I'd say yes to this question. the great thinga bout never using some stuff is that the pcs don't know you didn't use it. So you can recycle it somewhere else in the campaign or revisit it. I have several sidetracks and adventures I just put off to the side.

 

[the Jester]

A better question is - is the time value of prep-work worth the payoff? One of my biggest complaints about d20 is that I might spend 30 minutes statting out some NPC or templated beast, only to have it slain in about a minute and a half.

There's just not any cost-benefit. This is especially true at higher levels.

This is a very good point.

One of my favorite encounters that I've run in my epic game involved a group of giants, led by an 18th-level cleric fomorian giant. He had a couple of longspear-wielding bodyguards and another couple of hulking hurler bodyguards. The encounter started at long range, and the cool thing about it was that the giants actually got to use all their tricks! It was an intense battle, and I loved it- I mean, I had spent a lot of time putting them together, and detailed the tactics of the leader (Fnogghi Chaos-Hand) out to about ten rounds... and actually got to use all of it.

But, on the other hand, I've spent a lot of time on encounter prep only to have a single round of attacks from the good guys destroy my beautiful villains in one round enough times that it almost makes me cry.

Then again, I get a lot of joy out of the act of creation/design, so I guess I never regret spending all the time- just that I didn't get to show off the cool tricks and tactics that I came up with.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

About 20-25% of my prep work never gets used, though I do manage to recycle some of it later.

The impact of this is I don't often go quite as far as I would like creating super-cool villains with unique magic and tactics for every encounter ... eTools fills the bill about 80% of the time.

 

[Kuld]

I would say about 30-50% but I will never run short on ideas now.

Unused ideas are one thing. What I really hate is when I forget something because I didn’t write it down.!

 

[Shemeska]

Initially not used? About 20-40%.

However, it eventually gets reworked and regurgitated later. I waited up to 2 years to use one particular bit of work, but it was used eventually.

 

[the Jester]

Here's a related question, too: how quickly does your party go compared to what you expect? In other words, I wrote what I expected to be a night's adventure. The pcs only got half way through it. Typically, the party seems to either go much faster or much slower than I expect. (Hard to gauge why....)

How about yours?