DM's: how long does it take you to whip up an adventure?

[Baron Opal]

It takes me 2-3 hours to sketch out the adventure, find a Map of Mystery that I like, photocopy the relevent pages of the Monster Manuals and decide what kind of treasure there is. This is about a third of the time, the other thirds are an hour long reading / adaption of a Dungeon adventure that's applicable or just winging it.

 

[Treebore]

It depends. Even when I just "wing it", like for my L5R game, I still spend an hour, sometime 3 or 4 hours, to just figure out how things/NPC's are reacting to what the players are doing, or did, between game sessions.

In 3.5, I had to spend hours just prepping to make sure I "knew" the rules for all the special maneuvers and/or powers the creatures/NPC's contained. I also always had to pre gen all the treasures, to make sure they were used by the creatures/NPC's against the party, and to let the players know what they are.

Even in C&C I spend a half hour to an hour doing some prep work, making decisions, etc...

When I need to print out and laminate some Fiery Dragon counters, or Fat Dragon Games, Skeleton Key tiles I want, that can add about an hour as well.

 

[vongarr]

It greatly depends on the type of adventure that is being run. A dungeon takes longer to make as opposed to a wilderness adventure. So give me an hour for an adventure that doesn't need a whole lot of planned structure, give me a couple more for a city or a dungeon.

 

[cmrscorpio]

Well, I generally don't create entire "adventures". I make material for the upcoming session.

I spend about an hour brainstorming about how the characters' actions in the previous session have impacted my campaign skeleton and how that affects the direction that the story is heading. My campaigns tend to be character-driven plots with copious amounts of roleplaying. I force myself to have at least one combat each session, but on extremely rare occasions I have run as many as 4 in a 6 hour session.

I spend about an hour creating the stats, finding pre-existing stats for the NPCs that the PCs will encounter, or thoroughly reviewing monster stats for my combats. Since I keep a database of all the NPCs I've created since 3.5 came out, as time passes I generally spend less time creating NPCs. Back when 3.5 came out, I spent about 4 hours poring over my books to create NPCs and adding templates to monsters.

 

[I'm A Banana]

How long does it take you to make a character?

In that time, I'll have something that can fill 4-8 hours.

By the time we're done with that, I'll have the next one.

Sometimes I'll spend longer on it because it's totally fun for me, but if I'm busy that week or whatever, no need.

 

[diaglo]

i'm a fly guy

 

[kensanata]

The actual prep time is an hour or two per session reading published material and looking up monster manual entries, writing down tacticts for the first three rounds of combat.

When writing my own stuff, the problem is that I need days to have good ideas. So many days pass before I can spend another two or three hours writing down notes and scribbling maps.

 

[Lord Ipplepop]

I usually spend a few hours one day developing the storyline, and the various components of the adventure... then I go back a coule of days later, find the holes, make improvements, and actually write any NPC's or monster charts tht need to be done.

 

[Wombat]

Anywhere from pull it out from between the potentially flying monkeys to crafting it for weeks.

My standard adventure prep is about 2-3 hours spread over a two week period, with additional small work to put together side events that might show up in almost any adventure. I have major NPCs set for when they are needed, major plot flows (and potential variants), and back up material in case the PCs fly off the handle (which they are wont to do).

I have run games entirely on the fly at the last minute, though, or altered an adventure wildly due to player reaction -- the famous One Sentence Adventure was almost entirely created on the spot. One-on-one games tend to be minimally plotted as this is more of a time for emotion and interaction than hacking and slashing.

Major plots are something that I work on over weeks, nay months! They slowly leak into adventures, drip by drip, until the players finally figure out what the heck is happening to them. Some of these have been quite devious, while others have been simply a matter of "you made your choices; now live with the consequences."