GameOgre
Adventurer
I played in a great game of D&D 5E yesterday with a DM who walked up to the table with the three core books and one page of notes. That's it. He ran a game for seven hours off one page of notes and we had a blast. He did look up a lot of monsters out of the book(we sure didn't mind or anything) and he wrote down notes on a second sheet of paper stuff that he needed to remember later.
After the game(it was a one off) I asked if I could see his prep notes and he handed it over.
It was filled with ideas and traps and monster/room descriptions(just enough to jar his memory of what he had planned I guess) a doodle map(encounters listed as easy/normal/hard/deadly), seven different one line adventure ideas(in case we didn't follow his plan) a word puzzle, a joke, the lyrics to Wild Boys,a short list of npc's,a short list of shops, a doodle of a bridge that collapsed into a cage and notes on our past games(like remember Barbie has a assassin still looking for her and Jammor is still haunted by the dead god).
That's it. He said he spent about 45 minutes total preparing for a game though did admit that mostly he works out the specifics of a encounter during play. His notes say orcs/hard and so he just figures out how many orcs equal a hard encounter on the fly.
Normally I DM and spend hours and hours getting prepared and even at times let my laziness prevent me from running a game(we could play tomorrow night but heck if I feel like spending three hours tonight getting ready, instead lets go see a movie).
I really want to adopt this style of DMing. It's amazing to me.
After the game(it was a one off) I asked if I could see his prep notes and he handed it over.
It was filled with ideas and traps and monster/room descriptions(just enough to jar his memory of what he had planned I guess) a doodle map(encounters listed as easy/normal/hard/deadly), seven different one line adventure ideas(in case we didn't follow his plan) a word puzzle, a joke, the lyrics to Wild Boys,a short list of npc's,a short list of shops, a doodle of a bridge that collapsed into a cage and notes on our past games(like remember Barbie has a assassin still looking for her and Jammor is still haunted by the dead god).
That's it. He said he spent about 45 minutes total preparing for a game though did admit that mostly he works out the specifics of a encounter during play. His notes say orcs/hard and so he just figures out how many orcs equal a hard encounter on the fly.
Normally I DM and spend hours and hours getting prepared and even at times let my laziness prevent me from running a game(we could play tomorrow night but heck if I feel like spending three hours tonight getting ready, instead lets go see a movie).
I really want to adopt this style of DMing. It's amazing to me.