DMing: from fun to work

[ruemere]

It's true that sometimes personal time constraints factor heavily in design of a session. Nevertheless, we live in the era of electronic aids and unless I am expected to GM on the fly in spartan conditions, I find it easy to use existing assets to form a plausible game environment.

Actually, most of my preparations relay on me assembling a toolbox of various in-game items, to be used when needed, but without any special order. With this approach, running a ready to go adventure is trivial.

Regards,
Ruemere

 

[ExploderWizard]

Game prep only becomes work when doing it starts to feel like work. It is a realization that just creeps up on me occasionally and I know it when I feel it. At that point it becomes time to talk about taking a break from running or to run a different game for a while.

 

[Lanefan]

I hear things like this on the boards all the time, and I just can't understand them. How is it possible for preparation not to take hours? Even in a game with no mechanics, no stat blocks, and no rules, preparation would take hours. Prepping the rules is not the majority of any campaign, world, or adventure preparation. Mapping takes time, even if you just do flowcharts. NPC's are work to create, even if you do 'Seven Sentence NPCs' and no stats unless you anticipate combat. It takes time to invent stories, think up plot twists, write down ideas, sketch out notes about dungeon dressing, etc.

Yes, but the question is whether that prep etc. is "work" or "fun" and what might make it change from one to the other.

The "work" part for me usually comes when I've got a homebrew adventure idea or a dungeon crawl dreamed up and have to stock it with monsters...how many, what are they, why are they, are any of them levelled in anything, etc. *That* gets tedious.

Worse come to worse, you can always run monsters 'out of the book' (the usual 1e method), and every DM needs to be able to wing it for an hour or two, but winging it only gets you so far in my experience.

This also depends. If you're one of those who - like me - finds the world-building end of the prep. to be fun, then you've probably got the world built halfway solidly and have enough detail either written down or stuck in your head that you can wing the actual game for weeks on end!

But even running monsters "out of the book" can get tedious, unless you've got the book memorized...or you don't care about minor mistakes and-or whether the monsters exactly reflect what the book says...because instead of spending pre-game time writing things down you're spending in-game time looking things up.

DMing also becomes work if I find myself running an adventure I just don't care about and-or don't like. I've had this happen more than once - read through a module (or design a homebrew), think "this'll be fun", and start running it only to find out halfway through that it's actually pretty much garbage...but now the party's stuck in it so I've got to run it through to the end.

Lanefan

 

[S'mon]

3e D&D is the only edition of any RPG I've found where prepping feels like work, so my answer would have to be edition-specific.

 

[john112364]

In your experiences, what changes the effort of DMing from being a fun activity to being grueling work? How often does it become grueling work? Or has it never become grueling work for you?

Bullgrit

For me it becomes work when either:

1. I don't have time to properly prep.
2. I don't have any inspiration
3. I'm burned out on DMing
4. Any combination above.

When none of these are around, I love the creative aspects of preping a game. (Sometimes more than the actual game, but that a discussion for another thread.)

 

[FireLance]

I find that the most important factor that determines whether DMing is fun or work is whether or not I'm using my creativity and imagination.

Even something like creating a stat block can be fun if I'm coming up with new powers and abilities or putting a unique creature together from pre-existing elements.

However, if I'm simply applying a formula, following a mechanical process or re-formatting a stat block for ease of reference during actual game play, it starts to feel like work.

 

[pemerton]

I've never had the statblock experience people are talking about here, but I've also never done much 3E GMing. It does seem to be an artefact of that edition.

I've had Lanefan's experience of having it be work to fill dungeon rooms with monsters. I solved that problem for myself by stopping running dungeon adventures.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Synchronicity: when randomly surfing threads at ENWorld, you discover a thread about advancing monsters via his free program.

Link: MonsterAdvancer.com

Thread found here.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Slogging through stat blocks. That's the least fun part of prep for me. Anything that helps with that makes me a happy DM.

qft.

A good rpg, IMHO, offers a good investment on prep time. For every hour spent prepping, I want at least 1 hour of table time, and I would rather have more. A ratio of about 1 hour prep = 4 hours play is golden.


RC

 

[Celebrim]

qft.

A good rpg, IMHO, offers a good investment on prep time. For every hour spent prepping, I want at least 1 hour of table time, and I would rather have more. A ratio of about 1 hour prep = 4 hours play is golden.

RC

I still would like to know the secret of these sorts of game masters. I don't know of any RPG, good or otherwise, that offers a ratio of 1:1 prep time to play (or better). I suppose I could manage that by confining myself strictly to published modules, but over the years I've learned that modules tend to contain the information that you can fit into 32 or 64 pages - and not necessarily all the information that the designer would have wanted to provide. Even published modules benefit from detailing and preparatory work, whether expanding on the wilderness area, or creating and detailing NPCs that are left as sketches or implied but not described, working out ahead of time how the PC's might get off the path the designer imagines and how you are going to handle it, or working out a more effective hook that integrates it with your campaign, or what not.

Seriously, how do you manage to get away with 15 minutes of prep work per hour of play? I don't get it. The only way I can even imagine that is if the game system is so clunky that combat/action resolution takes a very long time.