My question here is for all the DM's out there that create their campaigns from scratch using the current edition that is available. How long do you usually take to get a campaign ready for your players. my players are rushing me to finish the campaign that i have started and I have not been able to get as far on it as i have wanted to be at his point. I do work 40 hours a week and have children so it is understandable that i haven't been able to get further on the campaign than i have at this point. I want to get a bit further with it but at the same time i need to spend time with my family especially my kids that i only get to see every other weekend. Please all dm's out there with kids in your lives please help me to find a good balance point because one of my players is my wife and she is getting very impatient with all of this.
A lot of people seem to be answering "how long to get a session ready", so I'll answer that as well.
To get a homebrew campaign ready to hold a session 0 with the players is probably 8 hours over multiple weeks. I come up with some interesting stories that we could explore, put together the rough idea of a setting that specifically supports that*, flesh out broad-strokes-only some of the setting - enough to be evocative and give the players both some hooks and some support, but no details. And let that marinate in my brain, jotting down notes every once in a while.
The we'll do a session 0, I'd introduce ideas, they'll hash back and forth what catches them, we'll do characters. At that point I've got a lot better idea about what interests the players, so I know what to focus on for the short term.
At that point I'm heading towards session prep, but the campaign part still has work - and will for the length of the campaign. I need to jot down some ideas about individual character arcs, enough that I can toss out some hooks during the next few sessions and see if the players find them interesting. I need to work out some medium term points so I can lay foreshadowing and make sure to tie it in early so it looks like I have everything planned out.
Hint: I don't. Nothing is true until it hits the table, and that includes all of my plots and plans. They get updated based on player interest, on what the party does (and what threads they don't do), and what I picture as a big finish could end up being a road-bump along the way - or even not in the game at all. Last campaign I had a high elf conspiracy, and over time it came out from the players that they thought it went all the way to the top, and a player bringing in a replacement character (for a martyr that saved others) working into his backstory a pretty bad thing that the elf queen had used the new PC to do, and suddenly this was a much bigger deal. And I reinterpreted some details that had only come partially out, about the elves honoring a defense pact against the incoming orken horde, and twisted it some, and voila!, new major plot arc that was consistent with everything that happened before but not something I pre-planned at all.
Anyway, after session 0 I do 6-8 hours of prep over the course of a week. So say 16 hours total over course of a month on the campaign itself: homebrew setting in broad strokes, some plots, ideas for character arcs.
In terms of a session, I like to throw multiple hooks at parties and see what they want to deal with. So I usually spend time hashing out several different directions enough that I can run any of them (and they usually find another option anyway), plus I detail out what I explicitly expect them to have to deal with - NPCs, encounters, rewards, etc. Say 2-3 hours for a 3 hour session. And half an hour afterwards to write up a recap and make notes from the session.
Note, this is what drove me away from D&D 3.x - prep times got ridiculous. Last campaign I ran was 13th Age which is like D&D but they sell legal PDFs - made encounter prep much nicer when I could cut-n-paste things.
When the party is going someplace new I take extra time to put into my notes things like local color to bring up, some chance encounters and such, a bunch of NPC names - prep I've found to help me describe and improv. I also take the broad strokes of the original document and flesh it out with more details. I don't go overboard on details, instead I have prepped a bunch of details I can fit into anything. To give an example, I won't prep out a bunch of shops with proprietors. I will have a list of generic shops by settlement size, sprinkle in a few unique ones, and come up with 2-3 proprietors that I can quickly adapt to whatever need I have. If they go through them, I can always work out a few more by next session. It's like a magician's force - next 3 of the 20 establishments you go through will be one of these three NPCs, edited on the fly for the specific establishment. Instead of having 20 NPCs pre-done.
I'd say ends up being 4-6 hours every few months.
