Enjoyment increases with the amount of prep I do. But it's because I spend my time prepping a toolkit instead of a straitjacket. I think a lot of GMs have a tendency to prep the wrong things -- things that are not only wasting their prep time, but which actually make them less prepared for the game because they're limiting their options instead of giving them more options.
Absolutely. I 100% concur on that. When people say that they get more enjoyment out of sessions that they don't prep than ones that they do, because when they prep the session becomes less flexible - that isn't because preperation is bad. That's because they haven't been taught or figured out how to prepare well (and in particular, how to prepare for themselves well).
Consider the One Page Dungeon. I'm skeptical of its general utility as an ideal, but as an exercise to remind yourself that prep can be kept to a minimum as long as you're prepping the right stuff it can be very valuable. And I really don't think you need that much experience in order to get a really solid night of entertainment out of a dungeon with 16 or so keyed locations described in a single page.
Done it on several occasions.
In terms of preperation to play time, thinly dressed dungeons beat anything you can possibly do. Probably the best preparation time to play time ratio can be achieved with the thinly dressed mega-dungeon. Using a 1:1 preparation to play ratio, you can easily create 10 or 20 times more dungeon than a single group could ever explore. Eight hours of prep time on a thinly dressed megadungeon probably gets you 80 hours of play time.
And if you can't write a page of text and whip up a functional map in 90 minutes, you're doing it wrong.
Depends on what you are mapping. Dungeons - and single level dungeons - are relatively easy because they don't have any signfiicant architectural contraints and don't really have any living or usage constraints either. They don't have to make the slightest sense and they don't have to have rooms that fit together. I can certainly whip up sketches and outlines for dungeons of the kick the door down, kill the monsters, and take there stuff variaty in 90 minutes.
It's pretty easy to see why Gygax is investing his preperation time into dungeon environments. The return on investment is very high.
It's also pretty easy to see that for an experienced group (or DM), this sort of stuff will bore to tears in very short order. I don't know how many stock unoriginal maps I've rampaged across. I have no clue how many bugbear tribes I've exterminated. I don't know how many traps placed on random doors I've disarmed. I don't know how many abandoned rooms I've gone into only to find a large predatory monster with no apparant prey other than us. I don't know how many false bottoms I've found in desks and chests, or how many treasures I've rescued from invisible vases. That's all great stuff, and I enjoyed it, but unless we are talking about new groups of junior high kids its not going to be something that is stock and trade in your group.
If you are trying to run something other than thinly dressed dungeons, then you have to put in more work relative to the return on investment if you are only measuring the return in terms of time of play. Let's say you move up to well-dressed dungeons.
Do everything you'd do for a thin dungeon. Then do the following:
a) Make sure that it has 4-5 features to investigate, at least one of which is not obvious.
b) Make sure that at least one skill or skill check in the room will be rewarding.
c) Make sure that the room has at least one clue about the larger adventure or dungeon.
Now we are talking instead of 10-15 keyed areas per page, something like 3-4. Additionally, you'll probably want to organize the information in a short readable form that you either read or paraphrase, because once rooms stop containing only one feature it becomes easy to leave something out. Additionally, at least some of your rooms are going to start to become so complex that they are really encounter areas made of several closely connected 'rooms'. This makes the map bigger than it actually looks like on paper. This is probably a waste of time on most of the areas of mega-dungeon, because it just takes too long. But on small dungeons (under 20 rooms) it can be very rewarding in play to have upped to this level of detail ahead of time. (See my first post as an EnWorlder).
Now, it's quite possible to run NPC's based off only a name and a job title and just fill in the details with stock character features during play. For a lot of minor NPC's that's the best prep because you aren't wasting time on something that might not come into play. But for major NPC's that you figure are very likely going to take up 10 minutes or more of player time, it's often worth it to move up to a 'Seven sentence NPC' where you spend a sentence on a memorable trait or habit of the NPC that will help the players identify the NPC, spend a sentence describing the NPC's motives, and give the NPC a secret of some sort. You can do this on the fly, but unless you are very good indeed, your on the fly NPC's won't be as varied, original, memorable, or well-realized as those you spent 10 minutes or so brainstorming.
Finally, while its perfectly fine to have a flowchart of events like: "When Nerissa learns that the PCs are investigating the murder, she'll send a squad of 12 orcs to attack them", in event driven scenarios that sort of thing isn't the real time sink. The real time sink is thinking through things enough that your world doesn't contain contridictions, and making sure that you have at least 3 clues out there for every plot form so that the PC's don't easily loose the thread of the plot. One of the big problems I have with people who 'wing it', is that alot of the time they don't consider the implications of what they just throw out there. You end up with plot whole, internal contridictions, plot points that require inexplicable stupidity on the part of someone, and pretty much everything else that if this were a movie you'd expect to find in a bad script. I can just wing this is often the Ed Wood school of DMing.
But I've been able to say, "Wanna play?" and whip up a fun, functional dungeon in 10 minutes while the players are rolling up their characters.
And I've been doing that since I first started playing.[/quote]
It's great to be able to get new people into the game. I've brought dozens of people into the game over the years. But really,
why are you still doing what you were doing when you first started playing? Surely you are also doing things that were beyond you 20 years ago? And in my experience, those things require more prep than thinly dressed dungeons do.
See, I'd argue the opposite: The single biggest reason our hobby is dying is the belief that being a GM requires a huge time investment and a devilishly complicated set of skills. And I think that's a belief primarily driven by GMs doing bad prep instead of effective prep.
Part of the reason that there is a belief that being a GM requires a huge time investment and a complicated set of skills is that it does. That's not entirely a myth. Alot of that problem be alleviated by good support from the professionals in the hobby and proper mentoring by experienced DMs of new ones (that drop off in mentoring is probably the biggest change I see in the hobby), but anyone that says DMing is easy is either really skilled and doesn't know it or has never done it. Now, that being said, it's not quantum relativity or playing concert piano (neither of which I can do). It's not even writing a good novel (which I could do, but lack the persistance and patience to do the work for). Anyone who is reasonably bright can construct decent 15 room dungeons, dress a room well, and craft interesting seven sentence NPCs. And I believe your game will improve for it.
