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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quasqueton" data-source="post: 1665583" data-attributes="member: 3854">I seem to end up with an inordinate amount of self-written/prepared adventure material that never gets used in my campaign. It seems that a lot of my time-consuming effort during the week is wasted when game time comes around.For instance, (and this is not really from my campaign, so don't concentrate on these specifics):I make up a lair of strange, evil monsters living in a cave complex too near a halfling village. In the game, the PCs discover the tracks of the strange creatures, and follow them back to the cave entrance. And then they walk away from the adventure and go elsewhere.I make an interesting and notable encounter with a local patrol who can give the PCs some useful information about the old abandoned temple they are heading to. And when the PCs spot the patrol on the road, they detour around them to avoid the encounter.I create an Assassin's Guild in the main city of the campaign. An assassin attacks the PCs in the night trying to kill a particular PC. The next morning the PCs decide to not bother investigating why they were attacked, and instead decide to just leave town.I create a bandit gang with a special treasure. The PCs come across the recent remains of the bandits' attack, with clear evidence of who did it and where they may be now. But they figure they need to keep on their current travel, and so merely bury the dead and then walk away.In years past, these situations wouldn't have bothered me much. The unused material would get filed away for possible use in a later campaign. But now adays, with work, family, etc., time is a valuable thing -- and I don't have much of it. So the time spent creating encounters and adventures ignored is time wasted. It actually is frustrating, now.I don't want to railroad the PCs in my campaign. I want the PCs to have the freedom to chose their way through my world. But sometimes. . . it just gets aggravating when I've spent all my very limited free time making an adventure for the game, and it just gets ignored, bypassed, or missed.Those of you who are DMs with jobs and families and other constraints on your D&D-creation time: do you have these feelings too? I don't want to be mad with the Players, as they are not intentionally "wasting my time" or anything like that. But sometimes, when I sit down to make up all the NPCs of the Assassins' Guild, I start wondering, "Is this even going to matter in the game?" When I start mapping out that dragon's lair, I start thinking, "Are they even going to go into it?"I'm having a sort of crisis of faith, here. Recently it seems that 50% of my work preparing for my game is wasted effort.Quasqueton</blockquote>

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