The Fighter-Cricket
Explorer
So the question what is the hardest thing in prepping for a session really depends on what your overall philosophy of running a session is.
You can say that a DM should prepare quite a lot for a session: Maps of the land, the city, and the dungeon, NPC stats, wandering monster tables, motivation resumes and biographies for the major NPCS, possible sidequests, riddles, items in the most important shops of the city, exposition and monologue of the BBEG. The list can go on for a long time.
I tried to do that and I felt really bad after a while doing something like that. DMing was a chore and not so pleasant like I wanted it to be.
Then I read Sly Flourish's "The Lazy Dungeon Master". It was enlightenment. Basically the philosophy is: When you feel that you overburden yourself with preperation and the game isn't fun for you, then try to step back and let go of overpreperation.
It has a great mechanic of how to prepare for a game in 5 minutes.
It worked wonders for me.
The only thing that approach can't solve is how to prepare NPC/enemy stats because that is often a thing dictated by the game system you are running. And that I find annoying.
You can say that a DM should prepare quite a lot for a session: Maps of the land, the city, and the dungeon, NPC stats, wandering monster tables, motivation resumes and biographies for the major NPCS, possible sidequests, riddles, items in the most important shops of the city, exposition and monologue of the BBEG. The list can go on for a long time.
I tried to do that and I felt really bad after a while doing something like that. DMing was a chore and not so pleasant like I wanted it to be.
Then I read Sly Flourish's "The Lazy Dungeon Master". It was enlightenment. Basically the philosophy is: When you feel that you overburden yourself with preperation and the game isn't fun for you, then try to step back and let go of overpreperation.
It has a great mechanic of how to prepare for a game in 5 minutes.
It worked wonders for me.
The only thing that approach can't solve is how to prepare NPC/enemy stats because that is often a thing dictated by the game system you are running. And that I find annoying.