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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Johnnie Freedom!" data-source="post: 3238198" data-attributes="member: 18723">I have finally figured out a way to prevent D&D 3.5 from taking over my life: ration my time.  As simple as it may seem, this idea had never really occurred to me until reading Dungeon Master’s Guide II, which contains a brief yet wonderful section on how to prepare within certain time frames.  So if you have one hour to prepare, do this.  Two hours, do this, and so on.  Reading this opened my eyes to the admittedly obvious fact that there is no sacred rule anywhere that declares that huge portions of my free time must be dedicated to absorbing as many rules and prepping as many monsters, NPCs, and adventures as humanly possible.  The problem with D&D 3.5 is the same thing that makes it such a magnificent and enriching game: there is always something more for the DM to do.  Always another stat block, always another encounter, always another rule, always another map, always another Dragon article or Dungeon adventure, etc. Interestingly, the same thing is true of my other passions: teaching (I’m a teacher), my religious faith (I won’t mention which religion, since it isn’t relevant and I don’t want to derail the thread—but it probably isn’t the religion you think it is), my relationship with my wife and four-year-old daughter, videogaming and reading writing. Not to suggest these things are all somehow existentially or morally equivalent (they are not, of course; videogaming is a silly pastime while my faith and family are my entire meaning and purpose for being on this planet), but they are all, to some extent or other, my passions, the things that consume my time, and the things to which I look forward each day.  And all of them have one fundamental similarity: they can each take up as much or as little time as I have to give.  With each one of them, there is always something more that could be done, and if I allowed myself to give in to a destructive spirit of perfectionism (as I sometimes do).So I’ve decided designate certain days as “D&D” days.  These are days in which I will allow myself to devote specific blocks of time to studying rules (I never get tired of that), reading and preparing adventures, statting out NPCs and pregen PCs, running sample combats, working on my spellbook (a cool idea I came up with—I’ll explain later), and just reading D&D books in general.  So Tuesday, for instance, might be a “D&D day”.  And on Tuesday I might set aside a two hour block, from 6-8 am, just for D&D.  It means I won’t feel guilty during that time, thinking, “I could be doing something productive, like saving African orphans!” but it also means that I won’t be flipping through D&D books outside of that block of time (which, in my case, has led to burnout in the past). Anyway, following the age-old law of diminished returns, I shall stop here and ask for feedback, input, advice, inspiration, anecdotes, or wisdom.</blockquote>

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